NEW ORLEANS — It was an offensive performance Giants fans haven't seen in years. Unfortunately for Big Blue, their 52-49 loss to the Saints featured a defensive showing and a late-game collapse fans have become accustomed to.

Down 42-28 at one point, the Giants rallied to take a 49-42 lead (believe it or not on a defensive touchdown), but saw the Saints tie the game with 36 seconds left. But the Giants ran only 16 seconds off the clock on the ensuing series then had to punt to the Saints, setting up disaster.

After breaking out on offense and breaking down on defense with a historically awful performance it ended like this: With 20 seconds left in a tie game, Brad Wing punted from his own 25 to Saints return man Marcus Murphy, who weaved his way up to the Giants 47.

But then Murphy coughed up the ball, and it rolled forward, and as receiver Willie Snead scooped it up and tried to run, he was dragged down by Wing, with an obvious facemask that drew a flag. At first, the refs picked up that flag, ostensibly because Snead could not advance the fumble and didn't need to be tackled, which would have set up a Hail Mary attempt.

But then they enforced the call, putting the Saints at the 32 and setting up Kai Forbath's 50-yard field goal, the winning points in an offensive masterpiece of a game that featured 13 touchdown passes and 1,030 total yards.

"I figured we were about to go into overtime," said receiver Rueben Randle. "Then that unfortunate situation happened with the flag and it gifted them a field goal. It sucks to be a part of that."

"I don't know why they came back and enforced it," said Wing.

The NFL knew — and said it was right.

"A personal foul cannot be ignored and must be enforced," a league spokesperson said of the call.

And you couldn't ignore how the Giants had put themselves into that nightmare situation in the first place. Big Blue fell to 4-4 on the same afternoon that the Manning-led passing attack roared to life in an old-fashioned quarterback duel with Drew Brees.

Manning passed for a season-high 350 yards and a career-high six TDs, three to Odell Beckham Jr., who delivered three celebratory dances in his hometown.

Advertisement

"I knew it might be a day where we were going to have to score some points," said Manning. "I didn't know how many it would take."

It needed to be more than 49, because of a Giants defense that surrendered 511 passing yards and seven TD passes (both franchise-worsts) to Brees, a defense that forced just two punts all game and couldn't hold a seven-point lead in the fourth quarter (again).

Brees operated with little pressure from the Giants pass rush, never sacked in the game, completing passes to 10 different receivers and leading an offense that steamrolled its way to 614 total yards.

"I'm not gonna give you a lot of adjectives to describe how I feel about not stopping them," coach Tom Coughlin said. "You're just going to have to live with the fact that we didn't do a good enough job, we didn't stop them. We got a lead in the game, we should have won the game. We didn't win the game."

And yet they were in position to win with 7:23 to play, when the defense made its lone game-changing play. The fourth quarter began with the Giants trailing 42-28, but on back-to-back drives, Manning threw TD passes to Dwayne Harris to tie things up. The Saints' first fourth-quarter drive had been a three-and-out, and the Giants had hope.

And on second-and-6 from the Giants 43, Brees made one of his few mistakes, firing a short pass that led Snead straight into Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, who thwacked the receiver, jarring the ball into the air. Trumaine McBride caught the carom in stride and raced 63 yards the other way, a fumble returned for a 49-42 Giants lead.

Odell Beckham Jr. is on the receiving end of three Eli Manning touchdown passes. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)

"We thought that was going to be the thing that turned things around for us," said linebacker Devon Kennard. "And it just didn't go in our favor."

No, because the Giants hadn't stopped the Saints from marching up and down the field all afternoon, and they wouldn't stop New Orleans' game-tying drive, either.

Brees spent the next 6:35 coolly moving past helpless New York down to the 9, capping the drive by hitting C.J. Spiller for a 9-yard score with 41 seconds to play.

And then the Giants couldn't get anything when it mattered most, leaving Forbath to hit that game-winner. The Giants had put up 49 points, they'd forced two second-half turnovers, and they'd showed the "grit" Coughlin loves to battle back into the game.

"Although we played horrible the whole game, we had an opportunity at the end of the game," said McBride. "And that hurts bad."

Except on this afternoon, the Giants really never were good enough.

"We did an awful lot of good things to win," said Coughlin, "but not enough, obviously, in the end."